Journalism and provocation

The proliferation of magazines in the United States, and the public’s impatience with painstaking demonstrations and polemics, helped establish the essay just as firmly as a receptacle for robust, humorous common sense, unpretentiously expressed, as in the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94). Creative writers resorted to it to admonish their compatriots when they seemed too selfishly unconcerned by the tragedies of the world. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, did so in A Time to Speak (1941). Lewis Mumford, Allen Tate, and other literary and social critics became crusaders for moral and spiritual reform; others seized upon the essay for scathingly ironical and destructive criticism of their culture: for example, James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), an admirer of iconoclasts and of egoists, as he called them, proposed European examples to Americans he deemed to be too complacent and lethargic; and, more vociferously still, H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), a self-appointed foe of prejudices, substituted his own for those he trounced in his contemporaries.

In other new countries, or in cultures acquiring an awareness of their own ambitious identity, the essay became semipolitical, earnestly nationalistic, and often polemical, playful, or bitter. Such essays sometimes succeeded in shaking the elite out of its passivity. In Uruguay, for example, José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917), in an analogy to the characters in Shakespeare’s Tempest, compared what should be the authentic South American to the spirit Ariel, in a work thus entitled, in contrast to the bestial Caliban, representing the materialism of North America. In Canada Olivar Asselin (1874–1937) used the essay to advocate the development of a genuine French-Canadian literature. Among the older cultures of Europe, Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–68), the Italian poet and Nobel laureate, appended critical and hortatory essays to some of his volumes of verse, such as Il falso e vero verde (1956; “The False and True Green”). Other European heirs to this tradition of the essay include Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Austria and Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht in Germany; their sprightly and incisive essays on the arts can be traced to the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Entertainment

One of the functions of literature is to please and to entertain; and the essay, as it grew into the biggest literary domain of all, did not lose the art of providing escape. Essayists have written with grace on children, on women, on love, on sports, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection Virginibus Puerisque (1881), or Willa Cather’s pleasant reflections in Not Under Forty (1936). Ernest Renan (1823–92), one of the most accomplished French masters of the essay, found relief from his philosophical and historical studies in his half-ironical considerations on love, and Anatole France (1844–1924), his disciple, and hosts of others have alternated playful essays with others of high seriousness. Sports, games, and other forms of relaxation have not been so often or so felicitously treated. Izaak Walton’sThe Compleat Angler (1653), however, enjoys the status of a minor classic, and the best of the modern Dutch essayists, Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), has reflected with acuteness on Homo ludens, or man at play. A Frenchman, Jean Prévost (1901–44), who was to die as a hero of the Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, opened his career as an essayist with precise and arresting analyses of the Plaisirs des sports (1925). But there are surprisingly few very significant works, except in chapters of novels or in short stories, on the joys of hunting, bullfighting, swimming, or even, since Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s overpraised essay, Physiologie du goût (1825; “The Physiology of Taste”) on gourmet enjoyment of the table.

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